Drowned
by ForeverFictional
Summary: Ophelia died as she lived.  Drowning.


Drowned

I feel like I have spent almost my entire life drowning. I've let myself be pulled under until the raging currents threaten to tear me to pieces. People will always see me as the sweet little girl, so pretty, so obedient. No one looks deeper. They don't want to, and in this shallow courtier world, no one has to. So it makes sense that none of them see me as I gasp for air before I'm dragged in over my head.

When I started drowning, it was my own fault. It started with the death of my mother. One day she was my world, and the next she was gone. I was too young, and her absence left me shattered. Her death became my life. The pain became too much for me to bear. So when the first wave of nothingness dragged me under, away from the pain and grief of the surface, I sunk willingly.

I might have been able to fight that, eventually. At least that's what I told myself. I thought that one day I would be strong enough to break free of the tides, strong enough to rejoin the happy and healthy people on the surface. Then my father stepped in. He felt as much pain as I did in my mother's passing, but he felt fear too. He had felt the waves of nothing pull at him, so he grabbed onto me as his lifeboat. He became over protective in his desperation to keep me safe. He thought that he could stop fate and fix his crumbling life if he held onto me. So while he gained assurance, I lost part of myself. His love, his need for safety, overpowered me, weighted me down, and made me sink deeper.

After that was my brother. Laertes was always impressionable. He followed the advice of others rather than struggle with his own decisions. He saw the way Father held onto me, and he began to do the same. They held on so tight, their lives were inextricable from mine. I no longer existed without the two of them. They towed me deeper. I suppose Laertes thought that if he shoved me away from the surface of the world, nothing could endanger me. He never thought that he could be the one causing me more harm than the world ever could.

Despite all of this turmoil, I had yet to give up hope. I swam up to gasp for air and I found Hamlet. He let me be myself; he showed me that I could me more than the nothingness. At first. Then I began to drown in his love like I had for Father and Laertes. Hamlet was a force of nature; there was nothing I could do to brace myself against his love. His love was like the tide, constantly shifting and unpredictable. His attentions to me were so vast that I lost myself. There was no fighting it, I just got swept away. I almost didn't mind. I was loved.

Then it changed.

I went from drowning in Hamlet's love to drowning in his hate. He spoke to me tenderly one day, the next he was sighing at my door for me, and the next day he was tossing me aside. I sank farther into his hatred, unable to fight as he tied heavy insults around my legs. He took away the self-esteem I had been using to buoy myself when he treated me as nothing more than a common whore. I was no longer his lover, and I lost myself once again.

And then Father was gone. Laertes was gone. Hamlet was gone. My mother was gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. And just like that, I began to drown in myself. These people were my life, yet they were gone. I was so alone that I was swallowed by the silence. Despite all of my attempts to swim away from it all, the silence kept crashing over my head. I tried to fill it by feeding it bits of myself, but too many pieces of myself had been taken away already. There was nothing left to give. Emptiness consumed me, and I sank past the point of no return. With no family and no love, I had no future. A current overtook me and I let my mind be swept away with it.

I spent my whole life drowning; it was almost to be expected that I would die that way as well. But I didn't drown. I didn't die. I simply washed away. All the pieces of me drifted off until there was nothing left. I wasn't Polonius's daughter. I wasn't Laertes' sister. I wasn't Hamlet's lover. I wasn't even Ophelia anymore. I was nothing. I was at peace.

I wrote this piece my sophomore year, and like most sophomores, my writing was slightly less than sophisticated. I'm reposting this with a few minor changes to the grammar and diction so that it feels less stilted. Please review and let me know how I did!


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